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In my previous post I shared ideas around the management of cloud-based systems such as Google Suite for Education (GSFE) and Microsoft’s Office 365. Building on from that post I have two important subjects I regularly get asked about around security:

Passwords

What to do when people leave a school

Passwords

The Verizon 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, states that 63% of confirmed data breaches involved weak, default, or stolen passwords.
A password security strategy should increase security with little impact on staff through highly secure useable practices. Here are some recommendations to consider:

When people leave the school

When an account is deleted, anything created on that account such as emails, files, folders, and calendars will also be deleted. An important consideration is: what content needs to be retained by your school, what needs to be downloaded or transferred to that person, and what should be archived.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework based on learning and neuroscience that aims to create learning environments that are usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialised design. At its heart, UDL celebrates the uniqueness of each and every learner.

Just as this whakatauki sees each bird as unique, UDL sees the diversity and variety of students in a class recognising and valuing the individual.

UDL thinking — Every student is unique — so, how do I design learning so it works for everyone?

The UDL worldview contrasts with industrial-age education that aimed to build a compliant workforce to work in factories. In this view, students in a class were viewed as essentially the same (same level, same subject).

Industrial age thinking — My students are essentially the same so I plan lessons for the whole class
and they all learn the same things at the same time.

In the industrial-age education model, students who did not fit into the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach were seen as needing something different and special to help them to learn. They were often not included in classes with their peers because their needs could not be met using the one-size-fits-all approach.

Thinking — I plan lessons for the class but I have someone different in my class, so what special things will I do for that person?

UDL is a framework for purposeful design for all

UDL relies on a strengths-based approach where the focus is on making the curriculum work for students rather than the student fit the curriculum. It is about smart, purposeful design for everyone from the outset. It is the opposite to a one-size-fits-all approach, but it does not mean that teachers are expected to plan 25 lessons for a class of 25 students. UDL aims to build student agency and utilise flexible learning pathways so that everyone can seamlessly access and engage in learning.

For example, if a student cannot access reading material, UDL asks how else the information could be presented, or how the task could be redesigned to cater for anyone who found the reading or content difficult. It does not focus on remediation of the student’s reading difficulties. Of course, I am not suggesting that reading problems should be ignored – they should be addressed as part of a well-balanced literacy programme. What I am saying is that poor reading should not be a barrier to learning.

Flexible options always depend on the specific learning intention for the group but in this example (to access reading material), options could include:

students using text-to-speech technology to read the passage aloud

offering ebook options

adding images to support understanding

peer reading (tuakana/teina options).

The aim is to offer flexible options that allow all students to be independent and successful without the teacher having to create multiple resources for multiple individual students.

Using an iPad to support independent writing for a student with ADHD

UDL thinking — creating an inclusive education

UDL is about what we believe is important and how we address the needs of students in our everyday classes. By working to remove barriers and design for all, we can help all students to be successful learners.

UDL thinking is a personal value and belief that we can apply to everyday decisions about the way we do things and the way we design lessons and curriculum.

Every day I ask my colleague Lachie, ‘Kei te pēhea koe?’ and he usually answers, ‘Kei te pai’ before we begin work together. Nothing unusual — apart from that he is in the North Island and I am in the South Island. We have a weekly meeting with our boss, nothing unusual apart from the fact that she is in Wellington and we are throughout New Zealand: Whakatāne, Picton, Christchurch, Dunedin.

The team I work with at CORE Education — The Learning Experience team, who work with content experts to create online courses — are spread throughout New Zealand — Whakatāne, Picton, Wellington, Amberley, and Christchurch.

Lisa Richardson and I discuss our five top tips for working in a virtual team in a podcast. These tips are:

Make sure you have the right (digital) tools in order for your team to be able to work together

Top tips for working in a virtual team – Lisa and Rochelle

“The magic thing about that is it’s the ability to all be in the same document writing at the same time.”

You’re listening to a CORE Education Podcast. Pushing the boundaries of educational possibility.

Rochelle: Kia ora koutou katoa, ko Rochelle Savage tōku ingoa.

Hello everyone, I’m Rochelle Savage, and with me today is Lisa Richardson, and we’re from CORE Education. Today our presentation is on Top Tips for Working in a Virtual Team, which is what we do, day after day.

Lisa: So, working remotely is not by any means a new concept, but because we’re able to work so collaboratively these days over the internet, there are days when I feel like, we are The Jetsons.

And we work together daily, yet we’re spread across the country, and most of us work from home.

Rochelle: So, how do we do it? Well, the important thing is, is to have the right tools. And as Lisa said, it’s the kind of situation we couldn’t have imagined, possibly, sort of five, definitely ten, fifteen years ago. As I often say to my children, my job didn’t exist when I left University, it didn’t even necessarily exist ten or fifteen years ago.

Lisa and I are part of the learning experience team at CORE Education, and we work with internal and external content experts to create online courses. Predominantly using the learning management system in Moodle. And we’re spread throughout the country, but what we do is we work on, often, the same documents.

And so, first of all, here are some of the tools we use to help us. One of them is a shared calendar. We have a shared calendar for leave, and knowing when people are taking leave, but we also can see each other’s calendars. We use Gmail, and so I’m able to sort of go in to a colleague’s calendar, see when’s a good time to book in an appointment, see when they’re busy, see if I can call them.

Skype — Skype is something that actually I use, almost, all day long. I often work with a colleague up in Whangarei, and what we do is when we’re working on a course, we will call each other, and then we’ll keep the line open, and when we’re working on a course we’re often working on separate paths of the course, but we’re able to ask each other questions, advice, talk to each other, and when we started out we used to have the video on, and we would see each other in Chat, but because of bandwidth and just to save on internet, what we’ll do is we’ll just have it without the video on, and just have the audio on.

We also use Hangouts as well, as another option. And the thing I also love about Skype is when you’re working together, you can very quickly drop links of documents you’re working on into Skype and the other person can click on them, and I often do that, but we all do that if we’re feeling a bit lazy with “have you got that up? Great — just pop it in there, thanks.”

Jostle is another is another thing we use which is an internal work system where we actually get to see what other people are doing, and it’s really helpful for staying in touch as our company is spread throughout New Zealand.

And the learning management system we use, well, one of them, is Moodle. And that’s where we build most of our online courses.

Lisa: So CORE uses Google Apps for Business rather than Microsoft, although we do have people who work in Microsoft, but the backbone of CORE and how we work collaboratively is with the Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. And for us, the magic thing about that is, it’s the ability to all be in the same document, writing at the same time. And also to be able to see who’s cursor is who’s — it sounds like a little thing but it’s actually really invaluable. So we can be in a meeting, if you click on the person’s little icon, you can actually immediately be taken to where their cursor is, if they’re saying “hey, look at this”, or “this bit’s wrong”, or “I need some help here”. And it’s also quite trippy to watch five people concurrently typing in a document and creating it before your very eyes while you’re sitting there by yourself. So that’s pretty cool. It’s also free, which is, and built to be able to be used from anywhere really, so I’ve never not been able to get into Google Docs, which is great, even on the crappiest internet.

We also use a couple of other things. So we use a lot of audio and video in our courses. So for audio we mostly use SoundCloud, and we use this both for podcasts, but also for our language learning courses that CORE runs, and we can embed them into our courses.

YouTube, obviously, along with the rest of the world – it’s a great platform. We can embed those directly into our courses as well. We, ah, sometimes document as a team if we’ve done something really cool, we might actually make a little YouTube, private YouTube video of that, in terms of a little professional development about how to do a particular thing.

Adobe Connect online webinar software that CORE uses, which is, we’re running a course and the participants will come together. They’ll come together in Adobe Connect in their online space. They’ll have their video on, and ask questions, and give presentations and so it’s emulating that live classroom through the use of Adobe Connect.

Rochelle: So if Top Tip One is make sure you have the right tools that you use, in order for your team to be able to work together, such as we discussed: shared calendars, Google Docs…Top Tip Two, for a virtual team, is making sure you have team protocols in place.

Like in a face-to-face team, it’s really important to have your own particular protocols. So a Top Tip is, what are those protocols, and to make sure everyone who is inducted knows them. When we want to contact each other, what we’ll often do is a series of steps.

So first of all, most of us have Skype open all day. So first of all type “kia ora”, or “hello”, or something in there, “morning”, and the other person knows that you want to get in touch with them, and then when they reply, you will call them. If they don’t respond, and often most of us will respond reasonably promptly, or say “I’m in a meeting”, or “I’m busy”, or “Talk to you in an hour”, and it’s pretty urgent, which isn’t that often, then you escalate it up, so you might email them and say “we need to meet about such-and-such”, and if you get no response from that then you escalate it up, and you’ll text them, and if you get no response from that, then you’ll call them. Those are the, sort of, the series of stages. That’s pretty much the case, isn’t it Lisa?

And we all follow that, and it’s really good because then you know you’re not interrupting someone, and it’s also because we do work remotely. There’s nothing more frustrating, I find, is when I’m right in the middle of something quite complicated, particularly technically, and I get an unexpected phone call that isn’t urgent. We’re very conscious of not invading other people’s spaces unnecessarily because if you’re in an office, you can look across and I can see Lisa, that, you were right in the middle of something and you had your headphones on, and you were, you know, frowning intently and concentrating hard — I wouldn’t come up and sort of shake you and go “Lisa!”

But because I can’t see you, because you’re working somewhere else away from me, then I want to make sure it’s important that I interrupt you and I do it in the correct way.

Lisa: So, so far we’ve been talking about the digital tools that we use, but when you are a remote worker it’s really important to meet face-to-face when you can, and this is so you can establish that human connection. So in our team we honour this by making sure that when someone joins CORE they have a really good induction — so they’ll be flown to Christchurch and take part in a really comprehensive day of meeting people and meeting their team, understanding the company, understanding how, I guess, what the culture of CORE is like and they take a lot of pride in that.

For us, we also use things like conferences as key events to meet up. So we’ll all go to the conference, and the last conference we went to we actually hired a house together instead of staying in a motel or a hotel, and it was really awesome that we got to spend that additional time together, have a few blazey conversations around the dinner table, or over coffee in the morning before we went to the conference. For us, that time together, it gets really exciting, you know, to actually see people in the flesh.

Rochelle: One of the things that we talked about before was that, um, where you Skype on a daily basis , and with Skype, obviously you have the opportunity to use video, and even though we mainly where we’re working together — don’t turn the video on anymore, we still do on special occasions, or if we just want to say hello, or, I had dyed my hair blue once, true story, so I showed everyone that day, and, one of the things that is really nice about the video is that you get to see insights into people’s lives. Like, we’ve all seen each other’s home offices, and houses, and we get to see at times each other’s partners, and I mean, for one of my colleagues, um, when I met his wife, I was, “Oh hi, how’s it going?”, and then I realised I hadn’t actually met her in person — I’ve met her via Skype maybe fifteen, sixteen times, so in my head we’ve met, but we hadn’t, and we’ve had conversations and that, but we actually hadn’t met in person.

So as long as the right culture is in place, you, you actually could be an even tighter team that a traditional team that works in an office, and I, I actually think this is true. Where I’ve worked in offices before and you can be right beside someone and you just get on with your day. And you go to your office, you say “hello”, and you might chat a bit at morning tea, but it doesn’t get that in depth but I would say, for most of us who work together, we know about the right amount of each other’s lives, and families, and what’s going on, and that’s really nice, and I think, also, it’s really important to have that, because it can actually be quite lonely.

I think one of the things about a virtual team, a Top Tip, is find a way to combat loneliness, because for myself, in my own situation, my children are at school, my husband is at work, and I’m in my home office, working away by myself, and it’s actually only those Skype calls and the other team that often can be part of what I’m doing, or otherwise I’m just tapping away, working away, for sort of six, eight hours by myself. It is important to, to do that. So another message is to have fun. And connected to combat loneliness, and another Top Tip, having fun, Lisa came up with a fantastic idea. She suggested where, normally, when you’re in an office and you bump into someone, and you have what you call, you know, those water cooler conversations, or you have morning tea, or you go out for coffee, and we don’t do that, we just tend to carry on working, so she suggested that, twice a week – at the moment it’s Monday and Thursday morning from nine till nine-fifteen – we meet as a team, virtually online, and we discuss a really interesting question, and she’s put that to us. And there’s been some hilarious ones. Like, one of them was, recently, was “Have you ever fantasised about having a name other than the one you were given” and so we all discuss this, and it was great, because we all found out things about each other, that, you just wouldn’t normally know. And also I then discussed it with my family at the dinner table, and it was great, and I think that, it’s really, really important is that you don’t just constantly talk about work. It can be very easy in a — people joke about virtual teams, like, “oh, how do you get any work done at home?”. And I would actually say the opposite is true. I would say it’s very easy to just carry on working and just to be very efficient, and not sort of stop and chat, and so, it is very important schedule in…schedule in fun!

Lisa: One of the final tips is that the technology fails all the time. As much as we like to think it’s, you know, that our world is now built on it, it does fall over quite often. We always have a plan B, and because technology and deadlines are really not friends, they’re kind of frenemies really, and we will combat this by, uh, we actually build in false deadlines, before the actual deadline, when something is due to go live or to be completed, just to give us some wiggle room in case there is a problem with technology. The most frustrating thing we find is actually when Skype doesn’t work. Ninety percent of the time it’s amazing, it’s—it’s great, it’s the backbone of how we work, but when we have a bad Skype line and we’re trying to have a meeting with five people, which happens a lot, and it’s not working, it is the most frustrating experience. In that case we will either move to Hangouts, or if that isn’t working we’ll phone in, go back to the old mobile, just in order to get that meeting done, if it’s — or we’ll just say “Hey it’s not working, let’s just reschedule”.

Rochelle: So, Tēnā rawa atu koutou, many thanks everyone. We hope that we have given you some insight into how we work as a virtual team. Give you some ideas of how you might work, if you are a virtual team, or would like to be a virtual team.

You’ve been listening to a CORE Education podcast. Pushing the boundaries of educational possibility.

I am privileged in my work and personal life to be surrounded by a multitude of highly intelligent, diverse people in a range of roles and responsibilities, including education, management, sales, finance, sport, agriculture, and self-employment, to name but a few. I am constantly reflecting and learning after my interactions with these wonderful individuals and living the dream of being a lifelong learner.

One particular area I am learning a lot about over the last 3 years is Pasifika Education in New Zealand from Anthony Faitaua and Aiono Manu Faaea-Semeatu. Their passion for Pasifika Education has really rubbed off on me and sparked a number of self-reflections. This has led to my own growth; having a better understanding of the different cultures that are in our classrooms and schools.

The pathway to leadership is through service (O le ala i le pule o le tautua).Serve to lead — developing emergent leadership skills

Until writing this blog post I did not realise that I hold the above value quite strongly, no doubt influenced by my learnings from Anthony and Aiono Manu as well as the values instilled in me by my own family, whānau and friends. I have grown up happily being the “boy” serving others, however in the last few years I have had more of a desire to begin to lead. In a mad last-minute decision, I decided to run for the local high school Board of Trustees, even though my own children are still a number of years away from attending the high school. I felt this would be an opportunity to give back to the community, while also learning a whole new set of skills and knowledge especially around leadership and governance.

“If we are to successfully implement the Learn Create Share pedagogy with the children we teach, it has to begin with the big people — the adults.” — Russell Burt, Pt England School Principal

This statement has resonated very strongly with me over the last 18 months and helped inspire me in my decision to join the Board of Trustees. ‘It has to begin with the big people – the adults ‘ is the part of the statement that I have taken across and have tried to replicate both in my own work on the Board of Trustees and in my role with CORE Education.

If we are going to govern a school, we must be putting our money where our mouth is and practicing what we or our school’s leadership preach.

As one of the big people, some of the things I have learnt so far to ensure wānanga (communication, problem solving and innovation) are:

Māori representation is a must on the board as the mana whenua of New Zealand. It is very difficult for me to truly understand what it means to be a minority culture when I have never experienced what it is to be in a minority group (this is reinforced by this blog post by Wharehoka Wano). A challenge with trying to diversify a board is that the members are not just chosen to tick a box, but instead are chosen to add their unique personalised perspective to the discussions around Ako, so that a partnership is developed that leads to better wellbeing, engagement and achievement for all members of a learning community.

Knowing who is in the room and where they come from, to allow them to create Whanaungatanga (relationships), is a crucial part of being on a successful board. At the first formal board meeting there is potential for board members to have challenging and robust dialogue about issues that affect achievement of learners. This can only be achieved if there are connections and relational trust built between board members. Knowing your fellow board members and how they like to be communicated and interacted with, how they learn, deal with stress, differences and conflict, understanding their emotions and motivation are important to ensure a successful board.

Understanding and giving life to manaakitanga should underpin all your board interactions. This is vital as it provides a lense to guide and evaluate all your decisions in relation to the governance of the school. Some key points for a board in relation to manaakitangi are:

acting with integrity, trust, sincerity and equity when communicating with the school community

understanding, following and modelling local tikanga and culture sufficiently

acknowledging and following local protocols when engaging with the community

leading and supporting school leadership and staff to embed manaakitanga

having knowledge of the Treaty of Waitangi.

To enable a diverse curriculum that ensures the school is an extension of the community, a board must recognise and embrace Māori as Tangata Whenuatangaa. A board will require an awareness of local environment, community and their interrelated history, and to actively acknowledge the Māori community as a key stakeholder in the school.

Having a board library with some key books, articles, blogs and videos is important to help develop understanding and innovation.

Currently, it seems Learning/Instructional Design is borrowing ideas from fields like User Experience and Customer Experience in the business world. I suggest we add another field to that list: Behavioural economics.

Behavioural economics is studying how real people make choices. Not conveniently-rational, utility-optimising, economic-theory people. But irrational, real people.

These are the same people we teach every day. Real people who don’t all love to hear a teacher speak or love to write notes; who don’t all rationally stick to deadlines — the people at the fringes, as well as those in the middle.

That is why I was so excited to see choice architecture mentioned in the wonderful book UDL in the Cloud: How to Design and Deliver Online Education Using Universal Design for Learning by Katie Novak and Tom Thibodeau. Some people have said choice architecture and behavioural economics are the same thing.

Richard Thaler (who happens to be the co-author of a behavioural economics book called Nudge) said,

“If anything you do influences the way people choose, then you are a choice architect”

To be expert learning designers, then, we need to learn more about what influences the choices people make.

Adopting a UDL (universal design for learning) framework in the way we design learning requires an appreciation that learning is all about multiple means; it is all about choices.

Here are some ideas that have been jostling for space in my head as behavioural economics gets folded into designing a learning experience.

Learners’ choice to complete learning tasks vs other tasks

Two concepts from behavioural economics that could help are:

Loss Aversion — that we focus more on what we may lose than what we may gain,

the Endowment Effect — that we value something more because we own it.

An example from Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational tells of a study he was involved in where die-hard Duke basketball fans were allocated tickets to a Duke basketball game by lottery. After the lottery, he called students who didn’t get tickets and asked them how much they would pay for a ticket. On average it was $175.00. He also asked people who had won a ticket how much they would sell it for. On average it was $2,400.00. Even though the allocation of tickets was random, those who had the tickets valued them more. He concludes this is because their feelings about the tickets have changes because they own them.

Leap with me to an education setting. What if we gave everyone full grades and a certificate at the start of a course? Then, if learners completed assessments at a level that matched the grades they had already been given, they got to keep them.

Could these same effects happen in education with something like grades and completion certificates? Would learners value the qualifications and good grades more because they felt they already owned them? Would they focus more on what they would lose when deciding to complete coursework or procrastinate? It is a small change, but it could have a big difference in the way learners approach completing courses.

How about another example related to choices made to complete assessment.

The power of expectations.

You may be familiar with this power already. Sometimes we feel it in relation to price. The more we pay for something, the better we think it is. It also happens in social situations. If you get dragged to a party you think will be bad, it probably will be. If you are looking forward to going out for dinner, it will probably be a good time.

Let’s look at another of Ariely’s experiments. This time it involves beer and vinegar.

Ariely tells of an experiment where they offered US College students two samples of beer and asked them to choose which one they would like. In one condition, students tasted the two samples without being told anything about them. One was beer, the other was a sample of beer that had two drops of balsamic vinegar added. In this blind condition, most students preferred the beer with balsamic vinegar.

In the second condition, students were offered the same two samples of beer, but this time they were told which one had vinegar added. This time, when students tried the beer with vinegar they grimaced and said they preferred the regular beer. Their expectations affected their experience.

Let’s leap to education again.

Assume you’re a student and you find writing an essay boring and tedious. You look at the options for submitting an assessment for one of your courses and you see an essay. “Again?”, you think, “this is going to be horrible”.

But, then you see there are multiple means of completing this assessment. You show you’ve met learning outcomes by drawing something, building something, recording something, singing something, annotating something.

“Oh”, you think, “building something is fun, I’m going to do that!” Your expectation then is priming you to have a more positive experience. You choose the option you expect you would enjoy more and chances are you will. All because the designer of that course was thinking of ways to give you multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression.

Don’t we owe it to everyone we design courses for to be the best choice architects we can be? Understanding not only what choices to offer, but how people make choices in their learning.

I think so.

Postscript: I’m not trying to say these ideas are capital T truths. A party can be better than you expected, there may be some things you own that you don’t overvalue. Rather, there are people out there studying how people make choices whose research should be of interest to anyone who designs learning.